God is bald !… A British alchemist, Leonardo Sciascia, and the secret that Mussolini didn’t want to share…

March 28, 2013

Synesius of Cyrene told us about the chances of God being bald. I came to the idea that even real gurus should try to appear bald, something that Aleister Crowley did instinctively.

Crowley, a charming bald psychopath, with a penchant for hard drugs and aesthetic gangbang orgies, who called himself Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast 666, was influential in theGolden Dawn mystical order that gave us the poet Yeats, among other unbalanced characters.

In his book of short stories Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-Dark Sea), Leonardo Sciascia imagines a hilarious exchange of letters between Mussolini and the chief of the police of Palermo concerning the presence in Sicily of this demented British Rosicrucian astrologist.

Aleister Crowley was obviously insane and possibly dangerous, as anybody who has read his Astrology could verify. He indeed founded a phalanstery in Sicily in the 1920s where, as the hapless policeman in the story writes to Mussolini, he and his female followers were walking around naked and having astral sexual intercourse in the midst of sado-masochistic ceremonies

A Sicilian himself, Sciascia mocks (in Apocrifi sul caso Crowley) the stilted official style of the Fascists (the obsequious police chief ends every letter with “con saluti fascisti“), and the finest moment in the story is when Mussolini answers to the chief of police’s description of Crowley’s doctrines with : “I don’t give a fuck. ( Io me ne frego.) I just want him out of the country!…”

GOD IS BALD!…

But then again, this extremely intelligent and seductive, although balding, madman had a theory according to which perfect creatures should have no hair.

I now know that he was basing his claims on Synesius of Cyrene (Greek bishop somewhere in Libya, beginning of the Vth cent.), who in his “Encomium calvitii” (In Praise of Baldness), proved successfully that God cannot have hair :

And now have a look at Alistair Crowley, Mussolini, Mayakovsky, or Yul Brynner… doesn’t that make you feel better?

Praise be to Synesius and Aleister Crowley, whose writings should rest on every bookshelf.

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Right, Aleister, you can leave your hat on…

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“Il mare colore del vino”…

In the same book of short stories Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-Dark Sea), Leonardo Sciascia’s leaves unexplained the chromatic metaphor “colorectal del vino”, which, as we know, comes from Homer.

There is an episode in which a pitiful character l’ ingegnere Bianchi, after falling hopelessly in love with a young girl on a train bound for Sicily, hears a horrible brat pretending that the sea at Taormina is “colore di vino”…

There follows a long conversation on the chromatic characteristics of the sea… “Where did I hear this expression, il mare colore del vino ?” poor Bianchi keeps asking himself. “Qualche poeta l’avrà magari scritto”, I think some poet wrote it.